I attended my first SeaPig meeting tonight and wanted to introduce myself. I'm Nate Sanders and I just moved to Seattle about a month ago. I live in Fremont and moved here from Honolulu after living there for almost 2.5 years. I was sitting across the table tonight from Chris Barker and made a comment about bit shifts if that jogs your memory -- I have dark, but greying hair and I wear glasses.
I currently telecommute half-time for the University of Hawaii-Manoa's Ocean Technology Group (noticed a couple of other oceanography-related people in the meeting) in a jack-of-all trades position where I do sysadmin work, convert scripts from Matlab to Python, get UH on board with various ship to shore and shoreside data repository initiatives and generally fix anything that's broken. It's mostly an easy way to pay the bills til I find something really challenging to work on. I have both a BS and MS in Computer Science. In grad school, I studied computer vision, specifically projector/camera systems, and wrote a lot of code in C++ (OpenCV, OpenGL, along with fast custom algorithms), Perl, and Octave, and built several projector-and-or-camera systems for distributed surveillance, color correction, high dynamic range imaging as well as easy-to-use camera and networking libraries for fellow students who weren't so Unix-systems-programming inclined. I wish I had been using Python then -- a lot of the code I spread across 3 languages could have been done with just Python. If you throw Cython into the mix, almost all of it could have been done in Python. My first trip to Seattle was in April 2010 when I went through Amazon's interview process and got made offers by both the RDS and Cloudwatch teams. I turned them down to stay in Hawaii and work at UH-Manoa instead because of the flexibility of the job and to look for more interesting jobs later. Later is now and I'm hoping to meet more and more people to get involved in a startup at founder or near-founder level. I'm also interested in possibly seeing what projects the Google Fremont office is working on. It was positively invigorating being at the meeting tonight after the underwhelming intellectual experience that was Honolulu. In over 2 years, I couldn't find a discussion half as good as some of what went on tonight. You guys are an impressive, friendly group, and I look forward to many more meetings and conversations. I have quite a bit of free time on my hands right now if anybody wants to get together to talk code, startups, math/data structures, whatever...just shoot me an email. Thanks again for a great meeting, Nate
